Sick'end Pictures: February 2011

As Sick’end Pictures we have put together three types of media for the promotion of our horror movie ‘Keys’, a teaser trailer, a magazine cover, and a movie poster. The main aim and target was to integrate our three products to work with each other well and generate a story to the audience, in order to create professional pieces of production that resemble the real media in society today. Throughout pre-production, we had a theme in our minds, and preconceptions of how exactly we wanted our media to look in the end. After planning and discussing colour schemes, we decided we wanted black to be quite a predominate colour, as cliché as it sounds we just wanted our products to be quite dark and gloom and spooky, which is connoted to represent mystery and evil. After focusing on the colour scheme, we drew up our logo which would play a big role in trying to create continuity and recognition by the audience. We incorporated this into all parts of our media.
First and foremost is the movie teaser trailer, which is a very brief taster of Keys. Again we adapted the dark colour scheme in this media product, and the font used is consistent throughout the trailer,

We used a lot of pale colors to create an eerie effect. The point of all this synchronization was to create a sense of identification. For example if these products were for the promotion of a real film, we would hope that audiences would see the poster and would automatically get the connection between it and the teaser trailer that they may have seen the previous day.

And at the end of the teaser trailer our Keys logo is present, for familiarity and recognition and especially branding. The same font and coloring was then adapted into our film poster and magazine cover so our audience can distinguish between Sick’end pictures material.

When we were ready for our classmates and other people to view our media products, we debated ways in which we could create a buzz and big interest around our products. Undeniably if you constantly see something in magazines, on TV, on billboards, on the Internet or even on the news, you would talk about it! So we ended up posting our teaser 3 products on Facebook & our teaser trailer YouTube and got a lot of comments to add to our audience research.
It is very important to use a lot of advertisement and networking to create success around your production. Some big time film Company’s especially Warner Bros take full advantage of how technology can make a films success take rapid growth and become well known universally. A prime example of one of their films that was a massive achievement was “Dark Knight” directed by Christopher Nolan, distributed by Warner Bros. Its production budget was £ 113 million; bringing in a whooping total gross of £ 324’084’106 million in the box office. The film did so well and made incredible

profit because of its intensity of promotion to all types of audiences, through lots of different ways, posters viral ads, games online, ads on food products, multiple trailers, competitions, toys and collectables, phone applications etc.

Obviously as students we cannot produce promotion in such intensity, but we tried our best to make our products available in variable ways. The poster and magazine cover are accessible on different websites online, e.g. Facebook accounts, Twitter, and Piczo. They were also put up in college for feedback and copies were sent around on mobiles via blackberry messenger as we had transferred the files onto our mobiles, so people could share any comments. We feel that our media products have been advertised to a good extent and are available for people to look at and comment on easily. Also on our Facebook accounts we have links to our blog & the Keys teaser trailer YouTube link as well.
To promote our teaser trailer we also did a pre-screening for some media students and recorded their reactions and their feedback. I think this was good because it also added to the buzz we were trying to create as it got people talking, plus it added to our audience research.
In all three products we have pictures of the same Keys, our main prop, which plays an incredible significance to our movie, again so our audience can understand that these three products being together and are all promoting the same main product – Keys the movie.

The idea of using continuity is a clever one because it lets everything flow, and will give us a household name, also creating a sense of stability. If we didn’t used continuity i.e. the same colors, fonts, logo across our products it would make our work look weak and there would be no connection, so how can Sick’end pictures create a fan base, they wouldn’t know what they would be following because every time we created some new media it would be significantly different from the last, not saying that all pieces of media should look the same, just have something in common so their can be a link between it all, and our work can be identified easily out of many.

THE MOVIE TRAILER: For our Horror Movie Trailer

I chose to challenge conventions of a horror movie trailer.
Firstly we will begin with the editing side of the conventions. In terms of editing we broke alot of conventions within our horror movie trailer. Conventionally, most horror movie trailers use quick cuts and fades to make the horror movie trailers, However we decided to us different types of video transitions and make the 'jump cuts'. much more 'creative.

For the transitions alot of this RGB Colour Split effect was used. Giving it a TV effect. We used alot of these constantly as tranisitons. Usually in normal horror movie trailers a standard cut is usually used to switch from one clip to another. To make the look of a trailer very fast pace the cuts are made very quickly in order to create the anticipation effect.

Any example of a horror movie teaser trailer that uses jump cuts very well is Sorority Row Trailer. Conventionally, towards the end of the trailers you start to see the cuts become much more quicker and fast pace to keep you on your toes. Whereas in our trailer we kept the pace of the cuts the same pace. The titles were inspired by the Saw IV trailer titles. Here is an example below of it:

Here are the two titles compared. The Saw IV title has the same shiny texy effect, something like worn out silver with a little glow in it. Also the background on it is very smokey, but it has been faded alot with the black in the background. Whereas Keys has a shiny text effect but the text looks worn out but glowing aswell. The background looks faded in but in a spotlight kind of way. It looks like a gate but it has been faded in with the black also. The two are very simliar and are both for the same type of genre also.

Another thing was the music in our horror trailer. We used an actual music track. With most horror movie trailers, sound effects and eerie music is usually what is used. With ours we chose to use a track with alot of bass and with more lyrical content. We decided to use a track like that to appeal to our aduience; more of a younger age range.

The duration of our horror movie trailer was not too long and not too short. It's just enough to keep the audience on their toes. It was just over the 60 second mark at 1Minute 10Seconds (With the warning screen and audience information inclusive). Most horror movie trailers run on in length at quiet a long duration, But horror movie TEASER trailers are a little shorter. I did a little research prior to making our horror movie trailer and found that alot of the teaser trailers go on between :30 seconds to about 1:10 seconds. Most of the trailers I watched were on http://www.youtube.com/visotrailers . This is a youtube channel specially dedicated to broadcasting all the latest movie trailers and some from before. I think our trailer still fits within the convention of horror movie trailers.

Here are two of the Horror Movie Trailers that made good use of the conventions and also stuck to the time limit:

and

Most of these trailers are within the conventions of Horror movie trailers.

The titleS of the film is conventionally shown within the last couple of frames within a horror movie trailer. In most horror movie trailers the title is on a dark and dingy background near to the colour black. In terms of the font it always stands out regardless of the colour of the background

Most of these backgrounds here are dark and near to black. The text stands out and the title of the film is shown clearly.

Most titles of film from the horror genre films use dark backgrounds with light coloured font, such as 'The Crazies' and 'Nothing To Loose'.
In comparison to our trailer we broke that convention and decided to keep everything near the same colour and tone. The text stands out just a little bit more than the background. Here is an image below:

The location plays a very big part in creating a horror movie.
For the first draft of our horror movie trailer we were going to set the movie in an open Grassland. Through doing research into our Sub-Genre of the film we realised that Torture Horror films usually have a setting of an Open Land and wide spaces for the escape/dialouge scenes. But for the torture scenes the settings are like spacious, but the torturing happens in one part of the set. A film that does that will are the 'Saw' series. Another set of films that follow this convention are Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Hostel, The Hill Have Eyes. With our film we tried to folow that convention and set the torture scene in a dark room

Here is the torture part from our trailer.

Here is the torture part from Hostel 2's trailer.

The reason for chosing the college as the establishing shot for the setting/location of our trailer is because we wanted to display the movie somewhere were you least expect things to happen. By showing the audience that this film will take place in a college, the anticipation is already high, because students go college and this can happen in our everyday live. In the torture part of the traieler we see the victim in a dark room. This is a means to show how vulnerable the victim is, creating an enigma within the trailer. Large rooms, cities and fields, are quite common in horror/torture films, showing we are keeping with the stereotypes of this kind of genre.

Every film uses costumes and props so therefore that is a general media convention. For our trailer we wanted to make it so the viewer can easily relate to whats going on within the trailer.
We had the villain as a janitor of a college. Janitors are usually dressed up in denim wear, because that material is very durable and can withstand stains.

Within the establishing shot we see one kid walking across the screen, this is to show that AFTER college hours there's still life in the college, and he was wearing casual clothing representing one of the students. Also the opening shot we see the victim's friends all standing around the lockers, representing a real life college vibe.

As for the victim, we had her in dark clothing showing that she is an anti-social person, not really much of a stylish person, in fact she is far from it. Even her clothin represents blankness and no character. It makes us weary of her character and whether she may show her true colours.

The way the characters are introduced is gradual. During make the trailer we did not want to introduce the main character quickly. What we attempted to create was an enigma for the viewer seeing as they were oblivious of the film plot and and the main character . However, when we introduce the first batch of characters (The victim's friends) they are seen as the usual teenage 'bitches', which is a stereotype used within some films of the horror/torture genre.

The first shot we see of the villain we see him walking through the corridor of the school, looking like he's coming back from a killing spree, what we don't know is who's blood that is until it reaches the torturing scene of the trailer, at that point we then find out who the 'Janitor' really is.

Overall, through intense research we have now been able to list some conventions of an Industry Standard Horror Movie Teaser Trailer

The time limit is always between 30 - 1:09

- Special Editing effects are always kept to a minimum (the most that is ever applied is a white noise effect or white flash effect)

- The titles are always matching up with each other. (Theme is kept going)

- Alot of in and out fades

- Company logo is always at the beginning.

- Film release date is at the end. Along with the rating and billing block of producers and directors.

- Quick cuts and fast pace action

- Story line is never revealed to much.

- Clips never run on for more than a second.

- If the film is in 3D there is a lot of stuff flying towards the screen as if its coming out to you

- Fade to black effect is always used

- Alot of promotional text like for example "From the award winning director of...". "The 5 time oscar award winner..."

In comparison to OUR Trailer here are a list of the conventions that were broken within' our trailer

THE MOVIE POSTER:

Through doing a lot of research, I looked at a number of OLD Movie Posters and realised that they followed the same trait. Within' the 60s 70s and 80s technology was not that great, this disabled a lot of film companies from making what we see in cinemas today.

Alot of the old film poster were hand drawn and looked like they were either sketched, painted or coloured. But the picture's were a lot more gruesome.

These are a collection of film posters. As said previously alot of these have been hand drawn. For example. lets take a closer look at the film poster 'Holocausto Canibal'.

Hand drawn/painted. Very grisly and revealing. The woman has been objectified as a victim and the person who in the movie will be eaten. It appears as though this film will be very tribal/cult/religious film about canabalism.

NOWADAYS film posters frequently use real life style imagery.

Once more as explain above, the majority of these images have taken images of objects. None of these have been hand drawn or painted.

Colour Scheme

The making of these horror movie posters require alot of detail and development. To produce an effective horror movie poster the colour scheme plays a good role.

Lets take a look at an Ineffective horror movie poster.

The title of this film is called 'Countess Dracula'. This was produced in the early 70's. To be more precise 1971.

I specifically picked this poster as a 'bad' poster purely based on its colour scheme. It shows no indication of a horror movie. If truth be told I thought it looked like the spoof version of a movie. Here there are about 4 or 5 colours used. With a purple background. Within the 70s period horror movie posters used alot of desert colours to make their posters.

The purple background is to hard on the eyes, conventionally horror movie posters use dark shaded colours. Not neon type colours such as the colours displayed on the poster.

An example of a well colour scheme poster would be 'Nightmare On Elm Street' the 2010 version. Most 21st Century horror movie posters are well colour schemed and there is not too much of a clash of colours.

RED is the main colour schemed in this photo. But what makes it so effective is that the photo is also graded with a red tone. The contrast between the two elements make this poster very good. There is a maxmium of 3 colours used, and they all are very bold and lucid.

Compared to our 1st draft of our movie poster I think that the colour scheming works very well.

It works well because the main image has a majority of a colour white. The image near the door way was intentionally over exposed. To also match that the text is white and everything looks in order.

But the Final poster looks alot more simpler and has less of that scary effect. No more than 3 colours again

Colour Grading and Effects

Colour grading is the process of altering and enhancing the color of a motion picture, television image, or still image either electronically, photo-chemically or digitally.

Horror movie posters generally don't have a colour grade to them but I believe images are enhanced. There are a number of Horror Movie Posters that usually enhance the images and give them a HDR look. HDR the abbrevation for Higher Dynamic Range is a set of techniques that allow a greater dynamic range of luminance between the lightest and darkest areas of an image than current standard digital imaging techniques or photographic methods. More simplistic it just means that images look alot more smoothed, crushed and sharpened.

Here are some examples of HDR Imagery

And here are some horror movie posters which look analogous to the HDR effect

All sharpened well edited pictures that stand out well and give that horror effect. The hard crushed colours make it a successful poster.

With our old poster that effect worked well because the image was not a Silhouette. So the image of the back of our character was crushed and darkened in some area's

and the HDR effect is suttle here...

Imagery

Within the last 3 years or so, the development of horror movie posters have progressed in the way imagery is displayed. Alot of posters use pictures of real life things and no longer hand draw things.

Depending on what the movie is about an image is taken based on it. For instance this poster :

One Miss Call. Quiet self explanatory. The image represent a clown looking face holding a phone. What can we tell about this movie from this image? That it will possibly be about the clown (villian) calling a random person and threatening to kill them if they miss they call ?

Let's take another look at another horror movie poster

This seems to me like another teenage college horror flick. About a girl who probably uses her looks to get boys and kill them, or lead them into a trap. Her sitting on an American style classroom desk is representing that the film will be perhaps set in a college environment.

We will look at one more poster just to see the trend in the correlation between the title of the film and the poster graphics. We will look at a old film called 'Childs Play'

This presumable is good word play. For the reason being is because usually dolls are for kids and they have a doll holding a knife. So we presume its a doll killing kids or humans for no reason.

With our poster we followed the same trend:

The title of the film name matches the poster image. Showing that the keys is a significant object within the film.

Titles

The titles in the horror movie posters are most frequently displayed at the bottom half of the poster, more often displayed in the middle section and rarely at the top part.

It's very rare you see the title's and billing blocks rotated in such a manner. The inspiration we got for our poster was from the poster 'Timber Falls'

This kind of technique catches your eye and strikes you as something you do not see regularly within horror movie posters.

Fonts

Alot of the fonts on movie poster's vary and don't really have a set convention. But what differs some of the posters from many other's is the sub-genre. The torture sub genre uses san serif style fonts, and the fonts usually look eroded or faded. Some look smudged or have some paint splatter on them

Here are some Torture titles that use eroded style fonts and bold text. This reflects what the sub genre of the film Torture. Showing that its wiping away slowly, or its being cut away just as body parts are cut away slowly in torture films.

Billing Block

Th of official film posters use a billing block. A billing block is the block below the title giving credits to the production company, directors, actors, music etc.

It is usually located at the bottom of the poster or below the title, in our case we decided to place it below the title.

THE MOVIE MAGAZINE COVER:

Magazine's usually follow the same trend as movie posters.

Looking at a number of movie magazines, the masthead's are usually overlayed with a picture of the main feature. Here is an example

Because our magazine was based on Empire Magazine's layout I have researched that these magazine use alot of the main feature to cover up the masthead's making it very eye catching.

With our magazine we followed the same trait and decided to use that same technique. We can also see that the selling line is above the masthead. For instance we will take the bottom photo where it says 'Meet The New Action A-List'. Seeing this automatically allows me to presume that this is off the magazine will be about action films and the best actors within action movies.

Here is our magazine cover. Though our main feature does not cover the main area of the masthead it still clips just a bit of it. and our selling line "Sickened Picture Returns For Another Sickening Picture'. The use of wordplay of the companies name. Showing that this issue will feature alot about the companies new film

The kind of image shots used for these magazine covers ranges.

Looking at the majority of these shots it seems to range through all the types of shots depending on the feature. It ranges from Long Shot to Extreme close up (The dark night feature).

With our magazine we used an extreme long shot because we wanted to feature the villain in our trailer. We chose an extreme long shot because we wanted the reader to undergo a feeling of distance between the villain and them.

Also looking at these shots about we see that the main feature also has a main coverline on the front of the feature. For example the Hellboy feature, has the main character on the front and then the movie name or feature name in the front in large font.

We also chose to do the same with Keys. Letting the reader know that this is the main eature this issue

This lets the reader know the main topic of the mag.

The colour scheme's also match up. No more than 3 or 4 colours. Too much clash of colours make an unattractive magazine cover.

We chose to stick to the 4 colour rule, Using black, white, red and grey. All have been used to a moderate amount.

CONCLUSION

We chose to break some conventions and keep some. Overall I think our products used a good balance of breaking and using conventions that industry use.

Tuesday, 15 February 2011

Media Evaluation Question 3: What have you learned from your audience feedback ?

Monday, 14 February 2011

Media Evaluation Question 2 : How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

Sunday, 13 February 2011

Media Evaluation Question 1 : In What Ways Does Your Media Production Use, Develop Or Challenge Forms And Conventions Of Real Media Products ?

Saturday, 12 February 2011

KEYS Horror Movie Poster

KEYS Magazine Cover

KEYS Horror Movie Trailer